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This blog does not claim to be always right. The blogger has no pretensions about being morally, politically, or ideologically correct. This blog contains random thoughts, rants, raves, hysterical protestations and sporadic thinking aloud by a person who is not out to please anyone or pander to anyone's idea of what is acceptable or ideal. Feel free to disagree, it is a free country.

Grain from chaff

The circus officially begins this week when those aspiring for national office start trooping to the Commission on Elections at Intramuros to file their respective certificates of candidacy. The whole exercise will be marked by all kinds of gimmickry which people will try to pass off asceremonial pomp and pageantry. There will be ati-atihan dancers, marching bands, cheer leaders,confetti, and hordes of placard-waving and shrieking supporters garbed in whatever colors thecandidates have chosen to represent themselves.

What all the extravaganza has to do with the occasion baffles the mind. When we come to thinkabout it, the filing of certificates of candidacy should be a solemn, if not sacred, moment. It’s whena candidate declares under oath his or her sincere intention to serve the people. It is supposed to markthe moment when the proverbial die is cast, when a candidate makes a date with destiny. Why candidates cheapen such a potentially poignant moment is indicative of their character and the value they attachto elective positions.

Commission on Elections Chairman Andres Bautista has laid down the specific guidelines to be followedduring the filing of candidacies this week. He has particularly asked that candidates limit to a certainnumber the supporters who would join them inside the Comelec offices. Let’s see if Bautista is ableto implement his guidelines—we all know from experience that most candidates and their supporters have the tendency to flaunt laws. The irony is that these people claim to be messiahs representing change and reform, yet they cannot be bothered to follow basic laws of courtesy and responsible citizenship. For example, most of them will be organizing motorcades that will create monstrous traffic jams that willinconvenience hundreds of thousands of people—the same ones they swear they will serve. And we can all be sure that all of them will be leaving behind tons of trash at Intramuros that most of them cannot bebothered to clean up. So right at the very start we already know that many of these people are hypocrites—their actions are not aligned with their supposed intentions.

This week, therefore, we really should be on the lookout for the candidates who will treat the filing oftheir certificates of candidacies with the decorum required of the occasion. It’s when we separate theclowns from the earnest public servants, the buffoons from the sensible ones, the grain from the chaff.

But then again, we’ve already known the real worth of certain candidates prior to this week’s filing ofcertificates of candidacies.

For example, Senator Ferdinand Marcos Jr., who declared his intention to run for the vice presidencylast week, made big declarations about the supposedly bold and revolutionary transformation that hewants to initiate once he gets elected into office. In the interest of disclosure, I will state for the record that having personally suffered from the political repression that was prevalent during the Marcosdictatorship, I loathe the Marcoses and what they represent. However, I will respect, albeit grudgingly,anybody’s right to run for any office and to make an utter fool of himself or herself in the process. In the case of Marcos, his bold pronouncements about the kind of movement that he will initiate andpursue once he gets elected as vice president come across not only as hollow and insincere —they werealso, quite frankly, ridiculously implausible.

Unless the line of succession is invoked, the post of vice president in this country has no value; he or sheserves at the pleasure of the President. Of course we all know that the vice president is next in line to thePresident, but there’s no guarantee that he or she is treated as such. In many instances in the past, we’veeven had Presidents who deliberately bypassed or ignored the vice president. Let’s call a spade a dirtyshovel—the post of vice president is basically a decorative or ceremonial position. Worse, if the personoccupying the post is not on the good side of the President, he or she ends up doing absolutely nothing,usually given token responsibilities hardly worth crowing about. So how Marcos intends to initiate hisgrand movement as vice president is perplexing.

We all know that Marcos is not exactly a moron, so we know that he knows about the limitations of thefunctions of the vice president. All those grand pronouncements, therefore were just that—an exercise in rhetorical discourse. That’s what Marcoses do best. Seriously, folks—we’ve been there before, haven’twe learned our lesson from the Marcos dictatorship yet?

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